| The Sunday Times Rich List has recorded the biggest drop in the number of UK billionaires in its 36-year history, falling from a peak of 177 in 2022 to 165 this year. Some tycoons departed for "sunnier, lower-tax destinations", while others dropped off the list due to the same inflation and high borrowing costs affecting everyone else. Meanwhile, Paul McCartney has become Britain's first billionaire musician. French police have killed a man who tried to burn down a synagogue in the city of Rouen. Although firefighters have brought the blaze under control, Rouen's mayor said the community was "wounded and in shock". Buckingham Palace has unveiled a series of unseen photographs of the Royal Family. The exhibition includes an image of four royal mothers – Queen Elizabeth II, Princess Margaret, Princess Alexandra and the Duchess of Kent — holding their newborn babies (below). See more here. |  | Lord Snowdon |
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| Maternity care has gone "from Victorian to medieval" | The all-party parliamentary group's birth trauma report, published this week, makes for harrowing reading, says Alice Thomson in The Times. Accounts submitted by more than 1,300 women who gave birth in NHS hospitals "sound like a description of the Dark Ages": pain relief and C-sections refused, bodies ripped apart, barbaric hygiene, antiquated equipment, lifelong injuries to mothers and babies, and one in 20 women developing chronic PTSD because of "shockingly poor-quality" care. Many women have been left disabled or with post-natal depression and a feeling of personal failure "when it is the system that has so obviously failed". My own first birth was so traumatic – 35 hours in labour with no pain relief and, eventually, forceps – I blanked it out. But I was lucky – that was two decades ago. Now I'm not sure I'd tell my own daughter to "venture on to this battlefield", which in 2023 had the highest death rate in 20 years. | For centuries women have covered up their shocking stories from the natal front line, but now the system has "slipped from Victorian to medieval". The government estimated the annual cost of harm from maternity negligence cases at more than £8 billion in 2021-22, while only spending £3 billion a year on maternity care itself. But it's not just a question of cash. We need to tackle a culture towards pregnant women that is too often "callous and uncaring". A farming neighbour remarked that his cows received better individualised treatment than his wife, who "was dumped on a chair in a windowless corridor on her own for ten hours in labour". If the thought of "overstretched, failing maternity wards, dying babies and life-changing maternal injuries" doesn't move you, ask yourself whether you want to live in a country where a "pregnant cow may receive more respect than a woman in labour". | | | | Christopher Beanland's new book Station is "a greatest hits of railway architecture", says Wallpaper* magazine. It includes snaps of Berlin's glass-roofed Hauptbahnhof; the 1930's avant-garde Ivanovo Station in Russia; the striking wooden shelter at Kohta Station in Finland; some seventies flare at Paris's Gare d'Auber; and the ultra-modern stations of Doha and Chengdu's metro systems. Get your copy here. |
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| | | Britain and Japan, "two island nations bookending the Eurasian continent", are having something of a diplomatic romance, says Politico. Brexit has spurred "Global Britain" to look for more far-flung alliances. Japan, mindful of Donald Trump's isolationist rhetoric and nuclear-armed neighbours China and North Korea, wants to bolster relationships beyond its traditional reliance on America. Since 2016, London and Tokyo have "updated their bilateral trade pact, signed numerous armed forces agreements, and shaken hands on joint projects to secure critical minerals and semiconductors". The two nations now describe themselves as one another's "closest security partner" in Europe and Asia. | | |  | Rat men Josh O'Connor and Mike Faist sharing a churro in Challengers (2024) |
| There is a popular online theory that men are either "eagle handsome, bear handsome, dog handsome, or reptilian handsome", says Serena Smith in Dazed. But there's another physical type: "rodent handsome". These men "are usually more svelte than muscular, with more pinched, angular features". They're often not conventionally attractive, "but this only makes them more hot". Two recent examples are Challengers co-stars Josh O'Connor and Mike Faist, but the likes of Tom Hiddleston and Kieran Culkin from Succession fit the bill too. Rodent men "are a little weird – but, vitally, in a sexy, funny way". The "golden retriever boyfriend" is dead. Long live the "hot rat boyfriend". | | | | | | Enjoying The Knowledge? Click below to share | | |
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| | |  | A New Yorker flashes Dublin through the portal |
| Technology doesn't transform human behaviour – it amplifies it | A Lithuanian artist recently set up a "portal" between a street in Dublin and one in Manhattan, says Sam Leith in UnHerd, via eight-foot-wide circular screens that "show a livestreamed video, 24/7, of what's going on at the other end". Surely this was a brilliant way to aid human understanding. "A kiss across the ocean. A connection between the new world and the old one." But that wasn't quite how things played out. The portals have been temporarily shut down because of bad behaviour. Within the first few hours, Dublin police "had to forcibly remove a young woman who was 'grinding her bum' on the screen". Other Dubliners took to waving images of the burning Twin Towers during 9/11. In response, a TikToker on the New York end flashed her breasts. | The fate of the portals is "a microcosm of the internet itself". It seemed to promise a "new era of global human connection", banishing misunderstanding and widening our spheres of empathy. "Instead, we turned 90% of it over to showing each other our furry bits and used the rest of it to insult people we'd never even met." Technology doesn't transform human behaviour – it amplifies it. "We're all still apes, with ape brains and ape instincts." We look through a magic portal, "see some wazzock in cycle shorts in Manhattan", and think: "That's a stranger, and a foreigner, and therefore funny, and what's more he can't get me from there: I should pull down my trousers and wave my bum at him." | | | | | | Alexandre Farto, widely considered "one of the world's top urban artists", has stopped using paint, says Euronews. Instead of a spray can, the Portuguese graffitist now uses chisels, hammers, knives and small explosives (above) to etch his artworks into the walls of Lisbon. See more on his Instagram here. |
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| | | Many assume that Joe Biden is losing the youth vote over his support for Israel, says The Atlantic. That's wrong. In last month's Harvard Youth poll, Americans aged 18 to 29 ranked the Gaza war 15th out of 16 possible priorities. In a separate poll of swing state voters just 4% of 18 to 27-year-olds said the war was the most important issue affecting their vote, and another found that even on college campuses, "the epicentre of the protest movement", only 13% of students ranked the conflict in the Middle East among their top three priorities. | | | | | | It's a 10ft-wide house built by a landowner in Florida to prove a point to his nimby neighbours, says The Times. Since buying the 25ft-wide patch in Jacksonville Beach in 2021, Ryan Wetherhold had been prevented from building a normal-sized house by neighbours determined to keep the site bare. Naturally enough, that only motivated Wetherhold to get something built. The resulting dwelling, which is 80ft deep, has alcoves that protrude from the sides, "allowing for built-in sofas and dining areas", and many windows and mirrored surfaces to create "the illusion of more space". | | | | | "Life is one long process of getting tired."
Samuel Butler |
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